Nearly 10 years to the day after the start of the Iraq War, some 19 car bombs and a shooting in the country’s capital left 57 people dead, almost 200 wounded and many more wondering whether they’ll ever feel safe again.

Israel is blaming Iran, its longtime adversary, for the deaths of seven Israeli tourists in a bomb attack on a bus in Burgas, Bulgaria. The bus was carrying 40 members of an Israeli group from the airport to their hotels when the blast occurred.

The recently uncovered al-Qaida plot to take down a U.S.-bound airliner took a dramatic turn Tuesday: It turns out that the would-be bomber who was chosen to carry out the mission was actually an informant for the CIA.

After deciding that its current arsenal lacks a non-nuclear bomb powerful enough to tear through 200 feet of mountaintop and obliterate Iran’s subterranean Fodrow nuclear enrichment facility, the Pentagon has asked Boeing Co. to make a conventional weapon equal to the task.

New York and Washington, D.C., police officers are ramping up security measures Friday in response to what intelligence officials are calling a specific, credible terrorist threat planned for the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

The queen has landed in Ireland, where she laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance to honor those who fought against British tyranny. And if you think that’s a nice gesture, you should see the emerald green outfit her majesty wore for her arrival.

In a bloody beginning to the new year in Egypt, a suicide bombing outside a Coptic church in Alexandria killed at least 21 people and injured dozens more. “This massacre has al-Qaida written all over ... ,” a church official said.

On Monday, after two Iranian nuclear scientists were targeted in apparently coordinated bombings, killing one scientist and wounding another, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pointed to the West and to Israel to place blame for the attacks.

Two bomb attacks on mosques left more than 60 people dead and scores injured in northwestern Pakistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the most lethal attack, in which a 17-year-old suicide bomber struck a Sunni mosque during Friday prayers.

The fate of Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to set off a bomb in Times Square on May 1, was decided in a Manhattan court Tuesday. The 31-year-old Pakistani-American, who pleaded guilty to 10 charges in June, was sentenced to life in prison ... (continued)

Officials believe as many as 15 gunmen armed with rocket launchers have attacked a supply convoy and destroyed at least 27 tankers carrying fuel for NATO forces in Afghanistan. The attacks, which occurred in the southern Sindh providence of Pakistan, may be a response to Thursday’s cross-border NATO airstrike into Pakistan.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg stopped in at “The Colbert Report” on Tuesday to comment on the whole Iran-bombing hoopla that’s affecting certain world leaders lately (you know who you are), pronouncing that ... (continued)

Something went off with a bang near Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s motorcade as it passed through the city of Hamadan on Wednesday, but the exact nature of the popping object was disputed in reports throughout the day.

According to Attorney General Eric Holder, the three men detained Thursday in conjunction with the failed May 1 bombing attempt in Times Square are suspected of supplying funds to Faisal Shahzad to help him carry out his plan.

Although Michael Bloomberg and various other media-friendly types made sure to share the same talking points about the recent New York City bomb scare being “amateurish” and “pathetic,” Stephen Colbert would like the alleged perpetrator to know that ... (continued)

A string of at least seven bombings in Baghdad on Tuesday killed 50 people, the latest in a series of attacks that have claimed about 120 lives in the Iraqi capital over the last five days, sparking concern that the level of violence and sectarian unrest will rival the bloody months before the surge of 2007.

A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center outlines a surge in extremist “patriot” groups in the U.S. The center claims that the number of right-wing extremist groups increased by 250 percent in 2009.

A Danish newspaper that published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban has apologized for offending Muslims. The penitence was part of a settlement between the paper and eight Muslim groups. The apology has been denounced by other members of the Danish media, which previously stood united in rejecting calls to back down in the face of Islamic outrage over the cartoon.

In a potentially historic development for Spain, the political wing of the ETA—the Basque separatist group—has announced it will call for the organization to lay down its arms after 40 years. Leaders of the wing are urging the organization, which has been in decline, to focus on bringing the issue of separatism back to the center of Basque politics.

Barack Obama gave U.S. intelligence agencies the presidential equivalent of a knuckle-rapping Tuesday for their failure to connect the dots and nab Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before a fellow passenger on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 was forced to foil his underwear bomb plot the old-fashioned way.

In response to the attempt to blow up a Northwest flight landing in Detroit on Christmas Day, the U.S. has announced it is planning retaliatory strikes in Yemen against al-Qaida members, though not necessarily those involved in the attack attempt.

Two bomb blasts ripped through a busy market in Lahore, Pakistan, on Monday evening, killing at least 36 people and injuring about 100. The bombs were reportedly set off via remote control, and the explosions came on the heels of a suicide bombing in Peshawar that killed at least 10 earlier in the day.

The latest in a string of attacks in Pakistan this week happened Friday when a bomb exploded outside the Inter-Services Intelligence agency’s northwest headquarters in Peshawar, killing at least nine people and wounding 50.

Some 100 passengers and several crew members made it safely off a hijacked AeroMexico 737 airliner upon landing in Mexico City on Wednesday. Meanwhile, at least five handcuffed men were escorted off the plane, which they had reportedly seized after takeoff from Cancun in an attempt to speak to Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

On Tuesday, eight people were killed and many more wounded in a series of blasts in Baghdad’s Ameen neighborhood—just a day after 52 died and 250 were injured in explosions set off by al-Qaida, according to Iraqi officials.

The Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta were the targets of two explosions on Friday in the first such attacks in four years. Nine people were killed and 50 injured in blasts that occurred within minutes of each other, according to the Associated Press. “There are indications of suicide bombs,” one official said.

The four men arrested Wednesday night for allegedly planning to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and gun down military planes were “not connected to another terrorist group,” New York Sen. Charles Schumer said in a statement Thursday.

Israel launched an airstrike and ground assault into Gaza after a bomb on the Israeli side of the border killed a soldier. The troops pulled back into Israel soon afterward, according to the BBC. The raid was of a smaller scale than the fighting that ended just 10 days ago, but shows the difficult work ahead for George Mitchell, the new U.S. envoy, who is headed to the region.

In a continuation of the decades-long struggle between the Spanish government and those calling for independence of the Basque territories, a car bomb went off near a Bilbao television station Wednesday. No one was injured in the blast, which authorities believe was set off by the ETA, a militant Basque independence group.

Police in India are looking within their own national borders for possible leads and potential allies involved in late November’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, following a technological trail to two new suspects arrested on Friday.

Several apparently coordinated bomb attacks in India’s northeastern state of Assam killed at least 67 people and wounded 210 Thursday, according to The New York Times. Thus far, no parties have taken responsibility for the attacks, which targeted heavily trafficked areas and government buildings in four towns in Assam.

The Turkish military launched an airstrike aimed at Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq on Sunday. It was the latest in a series of cross-border attacks authorized by the Turkish parliament in response to what it has criticized as the Iraqi government’s lack of attention to the Kurdish fighters.

At least 40 people were killed and scores more injured Saturday when a truck bomb detonated near the entrance of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan—a destination for Westerners and other visitors to the Pakistani capital city—as heads of state dined at the prime minister’s house nearby.

One hundred eleven countries have signed a comprehensive ban on the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster bombs, concluding a 12-day meeting on the issue in Dublin. Notably absent from the list of signatories was the U.S.—the largest cluster bomb manufacturer in the world—as well as military heavyweights Israel, Russia, China, India and Pakistan.

A homemade bomb was reportedly the cause of a deadly explosion Saturday at a mosque in Shiraz, about 560 miles south of Iran’s capital city, Tehran. According to Iran’s Fars news agency, nine people were killed and 105 wounded by the blast.

It was a violent Sunday in Iraq, as attacks of all stripes killed dozens and the U.S. death toll crossed 4,000. A day of suicide bombings, shootings and rocket and mortar attacks has cast yet another shadow over the “surge.”

War creates a world without empathy. Those who have empathy cannot, as did Palestinian gunman Alaa Hisham Abu Dheim, coldly murder students in a Jerusalem library. Those who have empathy cannot drop tons of iron fragmentation bombs on crowded Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, killing more than 120 Palestinians in a week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians.

On Tuesday, the Iraqi Cabinet expressed extreme displeasure over the incursion of Turkish troops into the Kurdish northern region of Iraq and called for a halt to Turkish interference, which Cabinet officials called a “violation of Iraqi sovereignty.” Also on Tuesday, an apparent suicide attack on a bus headed toward Syria from Mosul in northern Iraq killed nine people, according to The New York Times.

The same Tayaran Square market in Baghdad that has witnessed so much bloodshed over the last few years has once again been bombed, injuring dozens and killing at least 14. The attack, which occurred after Friday prayers when the market was crowded, took place just across the Tigris from the Green Zone.

A quartet of new books provides an inside look at Pakistan’s nuclear smuggling network and how it flourished. A sordid tale of how the United States simultaneously acted as an enabler for the construction of the “Islamic Bomb” and coddled the Islamists who might one day control it.

In this excerpt from his new book, “The Iran Agenda,” veteran independent journalist and Truthdig contributor Reese Erlich challenges the conventional wisdom on Iran’s nuclear ambitions as he investigates the drive for war.

A man who said he had a bomb strapped to his chest took and eventually released several hostages at a Hillary Clinton campaign office Friday. The man demanded to speak with Hillary, who was in the Washington, D.C., area at the time. Either for safety reasons or simply to not be outdone, a Barack Obama campaign office also evacuated.

More than a hundred Pakistanis were killed Thursday by two bomb blasts as a crowd of 200,000 gathered to witness the return of exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto herself escaped unscathed and was rushed to her home.